New tools for internationally-scalable future-proof transport planning

Robin Lovelace

r.lovelace@leeds.ac.uk

Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds

October 22, 2025

Context

About me and my background
- Professor of Transport Data Science at University of Leeds
- Focus on open, reproducible transport planning tools
- Worked in Active Travel England to build data and digital capacity
What I’ll be talking about today: open, reproducible, internationally-scalable transport tools
How this aligns with GREENTRAVEL project’s aims and themes

Thank you for the invitation to speak at this networking event on active, sustainable and green urban mobility at the Finnish Embassy.

I’m particularly excited to be here because of the strong alignment between my work on open transport planning tools and the GREENTRAVEL project’s focus on:

Greenery and green infrastructure in urban environments
Active travel promotion and planning
Exposure-aware routing that considers air quality and environmental factors
Multi-city analysis to enable international comparisons and learning

These themes run through everything I’ll be presenting today, and I hope we can find opportunities to collaborate and share knowledge across our projects.

What I’ll be covering today includes:

Why open and future-proof?
Scalable tools and case studies (UK, Portugal, international)
Opportunities to connect with GREENTRAVEL and partners

International context

Why open access beyond open source?

“Open access goes beyond open source … users are encouraged to view and edit the source code, with measures taken to make it more user-friendly.”

Source: (Lovelace, Parkin, and Cohen 2020)

Communities of practice

Open source books have 80+ contributors
Technical solutions are only as good as the community using (and contributing to) them
Share datasets, reproducible examples
Pilot features, report bugs, contribute docs

Example: plan.activetravelengland.gov.uk

Reproducible research in practice

Fully reproducible pipelines improve trust, reuse and scale
Example: spanishoddata package and paper now part of rOpenSpain community (Kotov, Lovelace and others, 2025)

Network Planning Tool for Scotland (npts.scot)

Discover and prioritise active travel networks at scale
Open data, transparent methods, web UI for planners and the public
National estimates of road traffic volumes and cycling Level of Service

International portability by design

Shared, open building blocks (data, code, methods)
Modular tools adapted from UK to other cities/regions
Aligns with GREENTRAVEL’s multi-city analyses and exposure-aware routing

Ideas for collaboration

Source: “Dependency” by Randall Munroe: xkcd.com/2347/

Illustration of the ‘jittering’ method for adding value to origin-destination datasets by simulating origins and destinations (Lovelace, Félix, and Carlino 2022)

There is a need for for fundamental and software engineering for efficient solutions

TRACE: scalable, low-cost active travel counts

SchoolRoutes: safer, greener routes to school

NetGen: crowd-informed network generation; “the crowd is the territory” (Anderson et al. 2018)

Thank you

Slides and code: github.com/robinlovelace/presentations
Contact: r.lovelace@leeds.ac.uk | (robinlovelace.bsky.social?)

References

Anderson, Jennings, Robert Soden, Brian Keegan, Leysia Palen, and Kenneth M. Anderson. 2018. “The Crowd Is the Territory: Assessing Quality in Peer-Produced Spatial Data During Disasters.” International Journal of HumanComputer Interaction 34 (4): 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2018.1427828.

Lovelace, Robin, Rosa Félix, and Dustin Carlino. 2022. “Jittering: A Computationally Efficient Method for Generating Realistic Route Networks from Origin-Destination Data.” Findings, April, 33873. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.33873.

Lovelace, Robin, John Parkin, and Tom Cohen. 2020. “Open Access Transport Models: A Leverage Point in Sustainable Transport Planning.” Transport Policy 97 (October): 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2020.06.015.